The American left loves communists and they love to claim the moral high ground with regard to the environment. They don’t seem to realize how antithetical these things are to one another. China is proving it with blankets of smog thick enough to ground airline travel.

In 2008, then candidate Obama gave speeches about how China’s infrastructure put ours to shame. We don’t know how many starved as China diverted resources into building a high tech facade for the world to see at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but we know it made Obama and his media water carriers drool.

Early in the Obama administration left wing columnist Thomas Friedman wistfully dreamt about how wonderful things would be if America could be a totalitarian communist regime “just for a day.” His reasoning was that the all knowing and all wise Barack Obama could use that day to dictate everything that is right and solve all the economic and environmental problems without any nuisances like checks and balances. Having total control is something people on the left literally fantasize about.

The problem with Friedman’s thinking here is that China gets to be China every day and they suck at being a country. Human rights violations abound and with regard to the environment they are a disaster. The air in Beijing looks like it rolled out from under Seth Rogen’s bedroom door.

Residents of Beijing are literally taking vacations from pollution.

Residents of China’s capital were wearing face masks and using air purifiers to try to avoid heavy pollution blanketing the city for a fifth day on Wednesday, but others were giving up the fight and joining a rush of “smog avoidance” travel.

Beijing led the country for searches on the travel website Qunar.com for “avoid smog”, “wash your lungs” and other terms related to traveling to escape pollution, said Michelle Qi, a spokeswoman for the site’s parent company, Ctrip.com.

Northern China has been shrouded in almost record pollution all week, disrupting flights, traffic and shipping, and closing factories and schools.

Searches for plane tickets from Beijing to southern China, including coastal locations like Hainan province, quadrupled this week, Qi said. Popular foreign destinations include Thailand and Japan, she said.

Hotels are advertising air filtration systems as amenities along with “micro forests.”

For those who can’t go too far, travel websites including Ctrip advertise hotels with air filtration systems in places across north China, where numerous cities having issued pollution red alerts.

“Enjoy a micro forest, live in a fresh air room: enjoy your own a complementary air filtration machine,” reads a banner advertisement on Ctrip’s page for hotel bookings on Wednesday, with a link to a curated list of hotels with the feature.

Yay communism!

Of course China has embraced capitalism to an extent, and now they have entrepreneurs making pollution masks that make a fashion statement.

What is it about communism and socialism that American Democrats love so much. People risk their lives to float away from Cuba on jury rigged rafts. Venezuela can’t afford toilet paper, or much else. And China is a polluted wasteland. You have to wonder about the sanity of people who fantasize about that kind of life.